Mancala

I went to a secondhand shop today and discovered an old game in a box, which I may well regret no buying some time soon. The box described the game as a version of mancala which I had never heard of before.

Wikipedia describes mancala as “a family of two-player turn-based strategy board games played with small stones, beans, marbles or seeds and rows of holes or pits in the earth, a board or other playing surface. The objective is usually to capture all or some set of the opponent’s pieces”.

It suggests that “versions of the game date back past the 3rd century and evidence suggests such games existed in Ancient Egypt. It is among the oldest known family of games still widely played today”.

I think the boxed version I saw was a version of a variant called kalah, the most widely played version in Europe.